I Am a Faggot

That is, I am one of the small number of men erotically attracted to other men. We have been around throughout history, and though we have always been a minority, and reports of us as a percentage vary greatly, we are never more than ten percent of the entire population, and usually less.  (Women’s sexuality is a whole different thing, and percentages probably don’t mean the same thing).  We are related maybe to birth order or something archetypal, but it doesn’t matter much because it’s unchangeable, no matter what “cures” are touted.

Marriage existed in Christianity from about 1000 AD, mainly as a way to control women and ensure a man’s legitimacy of heirs, and before that it was usually about a man and his (multiple) erotic attachments or about the ones who did his cooking and cleaning so he could do the important stuff.  Unless it was a high enough class that marriage was 100 percent about legitimacy.

Sometime around the twentieth century, in connection with birth control and the arising of the notion that women could be ordinarily intelligent human beings (interrelated phenomena) marriage morphed into something previously unseen: the union of two equals (seldom, if ever, attained) making decisions together.

 The evangelical heresy that’s taken over insists that marriage has always been thus, or that the seeds of modern marriage were always there (that it was AT LEAST always between one man and one woman, despite biblical evidence to the contrary, where marriage was ALWAYS plural).

What do I mean by evangelical heresy? I mean any notion that God is a separately existing “being,” who occupied a particular human body about two millennia ago, did some magic tricks to prove it was really him, then seemed to die, but really came back to life to save from death/punishment all who believed In him correctly.  And, with it, the notion that the Bible was always existent and was always available to a large population of Christians, that it was not just a phenomenon of the last fifth or so of the age of Christianity. And that it was always a rule book.  That there were three verses (one of them very ambiguous) thought to prohibit male homosexuality (female didn’t seem to exist) in the face of a zillion verses that insist on fair treatment of the widow and the orphan (conveniently ignored).  And that the “Bible” is really what is said by influential preachers or clergymen. (Most of them, men).  That’s what I mean.  The truth is more complicated than that.  And It’s hardly the thing you become a missionary for.  And the evangelical heresy has now taken over the world, not only the evangelical churches (which are bad enough) but all the other churches too and the whole American government.  These people are bullies, like all heretics, and most are afraid of them.  But not me.

Back to the evangelical heresy where it comes to marriage. “Traditional” marriage is an evangelical phenomenon.  Things were always done that way, after all.  And there must be something foundational about society that evangelicalism preserves.  Make no mistake: it is about preserving the status quo.

Here’s what I think: literal sex is always transcended in favor of greater intimacy.  And this is true for everyone.  But that doesn’t make “literal” sex bad.  If it’s on the trajectory to greater intimacy, it’s hard to see it as anything but good.  But the evangelical heresy is evil.  Best if it just goes away.  But since it preserves the status quo, I’m not holding my breath.  What will probably happen instead, if it happens at all, is that evangelicalism will just die.  But I’m nothing holding my breath on that either.